1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet clients and servers; and, more particularly, to search engines operating on the Internet.
2. Related Art
Search engines deliver search results based upon a search string. Searching can help users find their way around Internet, which contains billions of web pages, or can help users narrow large amounts of information down to workable sub-sets of meaningful information that is relevant to the user's interest. Only a very few of the billions of web pages on the Internet are useful to a user, depending upon what a user is looking for at any given time. A user may look for web pages with a variety of interests such as business, medical, social, engineering, and scientific research as well as home-based general or personal interests. Search engines usually select web links based upon a search keyword (or, search phrase or search string) and often orders search results based on the rank-ordered popularity of the web links with each other.
Typically, users look for web links that contain useful information with certain user expectations. The specific expectations may relate to specific business, engineering and scientific organizations, medical, help groups, web sites designed to impart knowledge, email web sites, or other information. However, the delivered search results are often not in accordance with the user's expectations, and the user's expectations are significantly different from the search results that the search engine delivers to the user. Search results that are delivered are often vaguely related to what the user is looking for, if related at all.
Popular web sites are pushed up to the top of the search result lists, assuming that all users who use the same or similar keywords have same expectations in mind as other users who visited the more popular sites. Often, this turns out to be a disappointment for many users because many users are in minorities when it comes to expectations and interest and it is not always a good assumption to believe all users have the same interests and expectations for a search. This assumption does not hold true most of the time. Thus, users waste a lot of time browsing through unwanted, uninteresting, and/or junk web sites before they can find one web site that is in some way is closer to what they are looking for (if they find any relevant sites at all). The user may never find the few web sites among billions of web pages that provide exact information regarding what they are searching for, because some of these pages may not be popular or may not immediately correlate well with the search string. Therefore, none of these meaningful web sites or search results ever makes it to the top of the search result list.
A user may often look for information within certain area of interest, and they may exhibit trends, habits, or patterns of looking for similar information or related information to a core set of interests over time. Unaware of user's interests, search engines deliver web links that are vaguely associated with user's area of interest, if associated at all. For example, a user may enter a search string ‘top bicycle riders’. The user may be looking for a list top ranked bicycle riders in world. Unaware of user's area of interest (that is, bicycle racing; and that the user is looking for top ranked bicycle riders worldwide), a search engines may deliver web links of top bicycle magazines, bicycle sellers, resellers and renters, bicycle touring in a remote holiday resort, etc. Unable to find what he/she is looking for, the user clicks on ‘next’ button again and again to scan ever deeper into the search results list, often getting same unsatisfactory results.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.